


song to an unsung grandson

by mayachain



Category: Earth's Children - Jean M. Auel
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Multi, Notfic, Post-Canon, Responsibility, Speculation, canonical rape/non-con references, f/m+m threesome, gratuitous healing sex, more talking than actual sex though, responsibility does not equal guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 23:15:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5604610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Ayla had merely been Ayla-the-woman, likely nothing in this not!fic would have come to light or happened. Ayla-the woman doesn’t owe Brukeval-who-resents-her anything. Ayla-the-Zelandoni, however, might.</p>
            </blockquote>





	song to an unsung grandson

**Author's Note:**

> I re-read Earth's Children this fall and once I got to the later books, this happened.  
> This being a not!fic - while I have edited it a few times, I make no claims towards its comprehensibility to anyone but myself.

So I want a universe where Brukeval gets caught after he runs away. Or maybe they find him after some time of absence. And Zelandoni (Zolena) meditates upon the matter quite a bit and in fact has done so on and off ever since his disappearance, and she has come to the conclusion that while she and the other Zelandonia as well as everyone Brukeval grew up with are to blame to some degree for the low self-esteem that resulted in this destructive self-hatred, Ayla is the only one who really has a chance to do anything about it, despite the unintentional blunders she has already committed.

So while the whole cave is keeping a wary eye on Brukeval in case he disappears again or does harm to himself or others, Ayla recluses herself for a bit to meditate on all the mistakes she made with Brukeval before, on what she as-Ayla- _and_ -Zelandoni wants to do, on what she can do, even, and how much she can do herself and what she needs help with. Then she gets Jondalar and has a long, long, long, very long conversation with him about it. (Because at some point even Jondalar has to grow up.)

The result of all this is as follows: Be it during the next Mother’s festival or ‘spontaneously’, Brukeval gets an invitation into their shared bed. Ayla explains it as being something she wants to do for him (not because she ‘owes’ him or anything, which she doesn’t, not sexually, at least, but because she-as-Zelandoni has come to the conclusion that it very likely is the most effective method to get her points across), and that Jondalar needs to be there not for her safety (necessarily, although that, too, is part of the reason, a bit) but because completely unrelated to Brukeval they have learned as a couple that only bad things come from one of them sharing pleasures with someone else while the other is excluded. (Danug would have their heads if they tried it.) Also, effectively having a threesome will have the benefit to prove to the Ninth Cave and anyone else who asks that Jondalar can stand to watch another man consensually touch Ayla without bashing that man’s face in.

One of the things she does early on, after Brukeval has agreed (been made to agree? how much persuasion would be necessary?) and the three of them have retreated into the relative privacy of their abri, is touch his face and point out all the features that she finds attractive and that remind her of men she grew up respecting and loving, like Brun. She confesses/confirms that she has long felt drawn to him when he is friendly/content/happy, but that he reminds her of Broud when he is angry, which is why she flinched away from him those times. (They can get to exploratory-touching other body parts afterwards.)

Brukeval is not at all comfortable hearing her talk about the ‘flatheads’ she grew up with and how he reminds her of them, but he agreed to this and so he feels he cannot leave, he hated being alone, no matter what he thinks about her theories he is in awe that she agreed to go to bed with him, and he is aware of the fact that Jondalar _agreed_ (however reluctuantly) when everyone knows about the man’s problem with jealousy; even if neither of them would let Ayla be alone with him during the Pleasures that are hopefully still coming, it speaks well of Jondalar’s esteem of him or at least of Jondalar’s acknowledgement of Brukeval as a man, which is something that was sorely lacking when they were both children. (For fuck’s sake, *how* could Jondalar have reacted to the news of Durc the way he did when he grew up with Brukeval. Shame on the Elders for not clearing matters up and only whispering about his mother’s possible heritage instead of making it a fact everybody had to bloody well deal with one way or another, damn them. And damn Auel for not thinking up the character of Brukeval when it was far too late to go back and edit in an earlier mention or even hint of him.)

At some point, either before or after the first time they all have sex, they talk about what Ayla thinks happened to Brukeval’s grandmother, about different possibilities. It’s also a way to trace Brukeval’s patrilineal heritage. They have determined that Brukeval’s father has to be the man who first slept with Brukeval’s mother after she had first matured (because as far as anyone knows nobody else ever slept with her and she was very young when she had him and died soon afterward), and that man was a close relative of Willamar’s (say I), also deceased these past few years, who was for all intents and purposes and as far as Brukeval himself recalls a good man and nobody to be ashamed of. It’s known who that man’s mother was, as well as who _her_ mate was who may or may not have been Brukeval’s grandfather, but that part isn’t that relevant. It is also known (or it is now known to Ayla because she asked the Elders who had the knowledge) who the mother and de-facto father of Brukeval’s grandmother were (which is where the connection to Marthona and thus Jondalar’s family comes in, I believe?)

In a Clan, Ayla muses, there is a small chance that Brukeval’s grandmother would have been given to the hunter with the lowest rank if said hunter was unmated and no other mating had yet been arranged for him. She doesn’t think that’s all that likely, however. It’s far more probable that a leader who agreed to take in a strange woman of the Others would have taken her for a second woman himself, as Brun would have done had Ayla been older, and as Broud had purported to do with Ayla once he became leader and as would have been proper had the relationship between them not been so completely horrible. Alternately, Brukeval’s grandmother would have been made the second woman of the leader’s Second… and while it’s possible that one of the other men would have signaled her, it’s also not a very likely thing to have happened, and so regardless of how nightmarish the situation she couldn’t fully understand and the horror she stood little chance to communicate to the ‘animals’ around her to urge them to put a stop to it – it is likely that the man who fathered Brukeval’s mother was of high standing in his Clan and, non-consensual as it surely was, while Ayla allows for the possibility that the man was as sadistic as Broud was, in all likelihood in his eyes and in the eyes of his Clan he acted honorably…

…while her mind was broken by the experience – but was it, even? Initially, at least? What does anyone know of possible injuries she may have sustained before she was found by the Clan? Wouldn’t there have been a spark to start a communication process at *some* point if the woman had been of sound mind when she first came across the Clan, the smallest common denominator, centered around food or water or fire or whatever (for fuck’s sake, *fire*). So little is known and even Ayla can only make informed guesses based on her own experience, but what *is* known is that whether or not she shrunk completely into herself/her own mind, at some point she got away from the Clan (cursed or left or escaped) and made it back to her own people, which cannot be called anything less than a show of inner strength (dumb luck? I don’t think so). (Did she try to talk about what really happened, _if_ she had a better understanding of it than is widely believed, and *this* is what got her the label of “broken mind”, or did she assume that nobody would take her seriously and so framed her story in terms that were somewhat expected? Nice going making all the women mute and have Others and Ayla interpret everything for them – Rydag’s mother and Echozar’s mother (though that example isn’t as bad) and Brukeval’s grandmother all.

These are possibilities Brukeval learns about, there in the aftermath of his unexpected sharing of Pleasures with Ayla-Zelandoni and (in whatever capacity that would happen, going by their previous attitudes toward each other) Jondalar.

Also there is talk of Durc and the love Ayla has and always will have for her son. *Also* there is mention of Jondalar’s reprehensible reaction when he first found out about him, and how they got past it. (What would maybe be a good idea is if they did all this while Ayla was 2-3 months pregnant, because then there would be no pressure on Brukeval on whether or not he could stomach the possibility of fathering a mixed child, and Jondalar would be spared the fretting over whether or not a resulting child was his, and Ayla would be spared the stress that would inevitably come of it. If, in the years to come, they get to a point where they agree to try (possibly after Ayla has given birth to a second son) then possibly Ayla could have a child that looked a little like Durc but also very different (being only 1/8th Clan), or also possibly Brukeval would get to a point where he’d start a fulfilling relationship with another woman. (Potential universe-split.)

And, like… it doesn’t get all fixed during that first night. It can’t. These are some very deep-seated rifts within Brukeval that are not *that* easily mended. But it’s a start. It was a start that they got so far as to be alone in the same room, even. It’s a start that Ayla is talking about her experience and Brukeval is listening. It’s a start that he’s… well, he hasn’t come around to believing that somewhere she might have had a point, but whether he was “captured” or didn’t try hard enough to escape when the Zelandonii found him, he did not take the out and kill himself (his instinct was *away from here*, not erasure).

The people who are, after all, _his_ people, will not leave him alone and there has been enough talking and talking *at* him beforehand that he has a very tiny sliver of hope that she will also listen to him, this time. And she does, even when he doesn’t actually say many words, because she was raised to read body language and now she knows that she was wrong to rush (not in being true to herself and trying, but rushing) convincing him. So now when she talks about her very first days and weeks among Brun’s Clan, there’s a willingness, however small, to accept her words and their consequences (read: the creatures that took little Ayla in were human) and there’s a willingness, far larger, on Ayla’s part, to accept that his self-image resting on prejudices she *knows* are false doesn’t make it any less real. 

And Jondalar is as-content-as-he-can-be to sit back and be a witness/act as a representative of the people Brukeval grew up with and who wronged him; not a saint by any measure but (unless spoken to) managing to restrain his role to that of an observer. Because. Because he should be made to grow up that much (and his people would gain so much from it), dammit.

.


End file.
